Obscure Friends Quotes

Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.

Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - gradutaing, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expecations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens. And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life. Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it. Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's a part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.

In this new year, may you have a deep understanding of your true value and worth, an absolute faith in your unlimited potential, peace of mind in the midst of uncertainty, the confidence to let go when you need to, acceptance to replace your resistance, gratitude to open your heart, the strength to meet your challenges, great love to replace your fear, forgiveness and compassion for those who offend you, clear sight to see your best and true path, hope to dispel obscurity, the conviction to make your dreams come true, meaningful and rewarding synchronicities, dear friends who truly know and love you, a childlike trust in the benevolence of the universe, the humility to remain teachable, the wisdom to fully embrace your life exactly as it is, the understanding that every soul has its own course to follow, the discernment to recognize your own unique inner voice of truth, and the courage to learn to be still.

You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!

It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.

She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her.

We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did - and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the mighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us.

Sonder - n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path,—let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.— Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, — solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude.

We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties,--even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice,--even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees--a mute friend, judge, and inspirer.

It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays--I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!

We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.

Same first name as a president and an obscure comic book character. Half-Jewish. Excellent grammar. Easily nauseated. Likes Reese's and Oreos (i.e. not an idiot). Divorced parents. Big brother to a fetus. Dad lives in Savannah. Dad's an English teacher. Mom's an epidemiologist. The problem is, I'm beginning to realize I hardly know anything about anyone. I mean I generally know who's a virgin. But I don't have a clue whether most people's parents are divorced, or what their parents do for a living. I mean, Nick's parents are doctors. But I don't know what Leah's mom does, and I don't even know what the deal is with her dad, because Leah never talks about him. I have no idea why Abby's dad and brother still live in DC. And these are my best friends. I've always thought of myself as nosy, but I guess I'm just nosy about stupid stuff. It's actually really terrible, now that I think about it.

The Trial By Existence Even the bravest that are slain Shall not dissemble their surprise On waking to find valor reign, Even as on earth, in paradise; And where they sought without the sword Wide fields of asphodel fore’er, To find that the utmost reward Of daring should be still to dare. The light of heaven falls whole and white And is not shattered into dyes, The light for ever is morning light; The hills are verdured pasture-wise; The angel hosts with freshness go, And seek with laughter what to brave;— And binding all is the hushed snow Of the far-distant breaking wave. And from a cliff-top is proclaimed The gathering of the souls for birth, The trial by existence named, The obscuration upon earth. And the slant spirits trooping by In streams and cross- and counter-streams Can but give ear to that sweet cry For its suggestion of what dreams! And the more loitering are turned To view once more the sacrifice Of those who for some good discerned Will gladly give up paradise. And a white shimmering concourse rolls Toward the throne to witness there The speeding of devoted souls Which God makes his especial care. And none are taken but who will, Having first heard the life read out That opens earthward, good and ill, Beyond the shadow of a doubt; And very beautifully God limns, And tenderly, life’s little dream, But naught extenuates or dims, Setting the thing that is supreme. Nor is there wanting in the press Some spirit to stand simply forth, Heroic in its nakedness, Against the uttermost of earth. The tale of earth’s unhonored things Sounds nobler there than ’neath the sun; And the mind whirls and the heart sings, And a shout greets the daring one. But always God speaks at the end: ’One thought in agony of strife The bravest would have by for friend, The memory that he chose the life; But the pure fate to which you go Admits no memory of choice, Or the woe were not earthly woe To which you give the assenting voice.’ And so the choice must be again, But the last choice is still the same; And the awe passes wonder then, And a hush falls for all acclaim. And God has taken a flower of gold And broken it, and used therefrom The mystic link to bind and hold Spirit to matter till death come. ‘Tis of the essence of life here, Though we choose greatly, still to lack The lasting memory at all clear, That life has for us on the wrack Nothing but what we somehow chose; Thus are we wholly stripped of pride In the pain that has but one close, Bearing it crushed and mystified.

Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself. Shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture; and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.

No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.

Eventually, I developed my own image of teh "befriending" impulse behind my depression. Imagine that from early in my life, a friendly figure, standing a block away, was trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself. But I-- fearful of what I might hear or arrogantly trying to live wihtout help or simply too busy with my ideas and ego and ethics to bother-- ignored teh shouts and walked away. So this figure, still with friendly intent, came closer and shouted more loudly, but AI kept walking. Ever closer it came, close enough to tap me on the shoulder, but I walked on. Frustrated by my unresponsiveness, the figure threw stones at my back, then struck me with a stick, still wanting simply to get my attention. But despite teh pain, I kept walking away. Over teh years, teh befriending intent of this figure never disapppeared but became obscured by the frustration cuased by my refusal to turn around. Since shouts and taps, stones and sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me, not with the intent to kill but as a last-ditch effort to get me to turn and ask the simple question, "What do you want?" When I was finally able to make the turn-- and start to absorb and act on the self-knowledge that then became available to me-- I began to get well. The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls "true self." This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another from of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self-planted in us by the God who made us in God's own image-- the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be. True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril.

It was as if we were having two different conversations. Which wasn’t that surprising after all, as we were clearly having two entirely different experiences of breaking up. His was soft, cushioned; Jude and his friends had broken his fall. Mine was cold, empty and bereft. I was freefalling in space and time, with nobody standing by to stop me hurtling headlong into obscurity.

Sonder. You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You're surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years. But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited craziness. When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you'll never be able to see. That you'll never know exists. In which you might appear only once. As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of traffic passing on the highway. As a lighted window at dusk.

She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.

Contrary to what many self-help books would have you believe, adding a great number of obscure words to your vocabulary will not help you advance in the world. You will not gain new friends through this kind of endeavor, nor will it help you in the workplace.

A particularly strategic maneuver is to decide that if we don’t understand something it must be wrong. After all, wrong is simpler than not knowing. Wrong means I am not stupid or failing. See all that sneaky, slimy projection happening there? Projection shields us from personal responsibility. It obscures our shame and confusion and places the onus for reconciling it on the body of someone else. We don’t have to work to understand something when it is someone else’s “fault.” We don’t have to undo the shame-based beliefs we were brought up with. We don’t have to question our parents, friends, churches, synagogues, mosques, government, media. We don’t have to challenge or be challenged.

He slept and in his sleep he saw his friends again and they were coming downriver on muddy floodwaters, Hoghead and the City Mouse and J-Bone and Bearhunter and Bucket and Boneyard and J D Davis and Earl Solomon, all watching him where he stood on the shore. They turned gently in their rubber bullboat, bobbing slightly on the broad and ropy waters, their feet impinging in the floor of the thing with membraneous yellow tracks. They glided past somberly. Out of a lightless dawn receding, past the pale daystar. A fog more obscure closed away their figures gone a sadder way by psychic seas across the Tarn of Acheron. From a rock in the river he waved them farewell but they did not wave back.

Life with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you--I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there's never any knowing what a man med do-- you'll have the sticks o' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief.

No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them in not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet. And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity obscurity is not uninteresting. To each his world is private and in that world one excellent minute. And in that world one tragic minute These are private. In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight it goes with him. There are left books and bridges and painted canvas and machinery Whose fate is to survive. But what has gone is also not nothing: by the rule of the game something has gone. Not people die but worlds die in them. Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures Of whom, essentially, what did we know? Brother of a brother? Friend of friends? Lover of lover? We who knew our fathers in everything, in nothing. They perish. They cannot be brought back. The secret worlds are not regenerated. And every time again and again I make my lament against destruction.

I was sitting in front of the hut and watching the ground darken and the sea grow a phosphorescent green. Not a soul was to be seen from one end of the beach to the other, not a sail, not a bird. Only the smell of the earth entered through the window. I rose and held out my hand to the rain like a beggar. I suddenly felt like weeping. Some sorrow, not my own but deeper and more obscure, was rising from the damp earth: the panic which a peaceful grazing animal feels when, all at once, without have seen anything, it rears its head and scents in the air about it that it is trapped and cannot escape. I wanted to utter a cry, knowing that it would relieve my feelings, but I was ashamed to. The clouds were coming lower and lower. I looked through the window; my heart was gently palpitating. What a voluptuous enjoyment of sorrow those hours of soft rain can produce in you! All bitter memories hidden in the depths of your mind come to the surface: separations from friends, women’s smiles which have faded, hopes which have lost their wings like moths and of which only a grub remains – and that grub had crawled on to the leaf of my heart and eating it away.

We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards. You can see where you've been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir. You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real. You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget. One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before you meet and go your separate ways. And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger. You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness. You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything. Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again. You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out. You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again. You'd remember what home feels like, and decide to move there for good. You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving. You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again. And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people. You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last. Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood. You'd become generous, and give everything back. Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see. By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world. And you will have left this world just as you found it. Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.

In many chapels, reddened by the setting sun, the saints rest silently, waiting for someone to love them." These words, penned by an unknown priest, long dead,were the inspiration for my new series on the lives of saints who have fallen deep into the shadows of obscurity. My hope is that, in reading their heroic stories, you will make the acquaintance of some of God's Forgotten Friends. (From the Preface of "Saint Magnus The Last Viking")

My dear Sue,—Of course I wish you joy! And also of course I will give you away. What I suggest is that, as you have no house of your own, you do not marry from your school friend's, but from mine. It would be more proper, I think, since I am, as you say, the person nearest related to you in this part of the world. I don't see why you sign your letter in such a new and terribly formal way? Surely you care a bit about me still!—Ever your affectionate, Jude.

You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons.

What we hadn’t known about, back then, was pain. Sure, we’d faced some things as children that a lot of kids don’t. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn’t learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you’re just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There’s the little empty pain of leaving something behind—graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There’s the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There’s the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn’t give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There’s the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens. And if you’re very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last—and yet will remain with you for life. Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don’t feel it. Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it’s a big part, and sometimes it isn’t, but either way, it’s part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you’re alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.

spinning playback head n. the disorienting feeling of meeting back up with an old friend and realizing that you've become different people on divergent paths-that even though they're standing right in front of you, the person you once knew isn't really there anymore.

Well, I do, I can't help it. I love the place — although I know how it hates all men like me — the so-called self-taught — how it scorns our laboured acquisitions, when it should be the first to respect them; how it sneers at our false quantities and mispronunciations, when it should say, I see you want help, my poor friend! ... Nevertheless, it is the centre of the universe to me, because of my early dream: and nothing can alter it. Perhaps it will soon wake up, and be generous. I pray so! ... I should like to go back to live there — perhaps to die there! In two or three weeks I might, I think. It will then be June, and I should like to be there by a particular day.

Hi Clara. I thought you would need someone to walk with today, so here I am.” Sorin, her friend that lived in the trailer park around the corner beamed at her from the sidewalk. Maybe not the best looking, but he was a sweet boy, and someone that Clara considered a friend. And like her, he didn't fit in at school either. His strange obsession with science fiction books and obscure poetry may have been the catalyst for that reputation.

As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them—the part of—who is it?—Venus Urania.

Thing and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would.

Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that most of my colleagues and friends have their own favorite but relatively obscure words that even they aren’t familiar with. The

Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me back. I would dine there again some time and he would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in France.

History is a story, my grandfather said. I offer a friendly amendment: history is many stories. Those stories are written, spoken, and sung. They are carried in our bodies. They billow all around us like copper-colored dust that sometimes obscures everything. In those stories, we grasp at meaning. We search for ourselves, for our place, for direction. We search for a way forward: a woman warrior, a complication man, an invitation home, a meteor, a lake, a child landing with a splat. Destruction and creation. Changes in light, terrain, and atmosphere. Delicate new freedom. Hope.

liberosis n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we bad-mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Thus only gradually did people realize (though their rage was all the greater) that the real scandal was not Prochazka's daring talk but the rape of his life; they realized (as if by electric shock) that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain-rippers are criminals.

Shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture; and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.

But it wasn’t for him to judge whether the artists were good or not—other people, plenty of other people, did that already. He was there only to offer the sort of practical help that so few of them had, as so many of them lived in a world that was deaf to practicalities. He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day. And, just as romantically, he thought of his time with the organization as his salute to his friends, all of whom were living the sorts of lives he marveled at: he considered them such successes, and he was proud of them. Unlike him, they had had no clear path to follow, and yet they had plowed stubbornly ahead. They spent their days making beautiful things.

It was early morning and already hot. There was a strong odor of earth and grass drying in the sun. We climbed among tall shrubs, on indistinct paths that led toward the tracks. When we reached an electrical pylon we took off our smocks and put them in the schoolbags, which we hid in the bushes. Then we raced through the scrubland, which we knew well, and flew excitedly down the slope that led to the tunnel. The entrance on the right was very dark: we had never been inside that obscurity. We held each other by the hand and entered. It was a long passage, and the luminous circle of the exit seemed far away. Once we got accustomed to the shadowy light, we saw lines of silvery water that slid along the walls, large puddles. Apprehensively, dazed by the echo of our steps, we kept going. Then Lila let out a shout and laughed at the violent explosion of sound. Immediately I shouted and laughed in turn. From that moment all we did was shout, together and separately: laughter and cries, cries and laughter, for the pleasure of hearing them amplified. The tension diminished, the journey began.

The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of "1" for the second "h" in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynthia, a much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane. ("The Vane Sisters")

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as ‘racist.’ I would obviously scorn to deny such an allegation on my own behalf. I would, rather, prefer to repudiate it on behalf of my former friend. He had known me for many years and cooperated with me on numerous projects, and I am quite confident that he would never have as a collaborator anyone he suspected of racial prejudice. But it does remind me, and not for the first time, that quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.

How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier. Honda felt that his youth had ended with the death of Kiyoaki Matsugae. At that moment something real within him, something that had burned with a vibrant brilliance, suddenly ceased to be. Now, late at night, when Honda grew weary of his legal drafts, he would pick up the dream journal that Kiyoaki had left him and turn over its pages. (...) Since then eighteen years had passed. The border between dream and memory had grown indistinct in Honda’s mind. Because the words contained in this journal, his only souvenir of his friend, had been traced there by Kiyoaki’s own hand, it had profound significance for Honda. These dreams, left like a handful of gold dust in a winnowing pan, were charged with wonder. As time went by, the dreams and the reality took on equal worth among Honda’s diverse memories. What had actually occurred was in the process of merging with what could have occurred. As reality rapidly gave way to dreams, the past seemed very much like the future. When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities. Since each of these was linked with its own reality, the line distinguishing dream and reality became all the more obscure. His memories were in constant flux, and had taken on the aspect of a dream.

It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artisans, drunkards, and paupers, she said, perverse still at his differing from her. They see life as it is, of course; but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires' sons.

Distance, my friend, is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls: the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision; and we desire earnestly to surrender up our whole being, that it may be filled with the complete and perfect bliss of one glorious emotion. But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant there becomes the present here, all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.

Maria Orsic, a stunning beauty and an unusual medium was not an obscure personality. She was known to many celebrities of the era and had a fleet of very powerful admirers and friends both in Germany and abroad; famous, brilliant and influential people like Charles Lindbergh, Nikola Tesla, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Henry Ford, Eva Peron, and the most illustrious figures in the spiritualism, parapsychological and psychical research in Great Britain. This was reported by Allies intelligence and documented by OSS operatives in Europe.

He was not attracted to the man in the sense that he wanted him for a friend, but he did feel he might help him – how, he didn’t formulate. It was all very obscure, for the mountains still overshadowed Maurice. Risley, surely capering on the summit, might stretch him a helping hand.

Auctions are a venerable selling institution, in use since the time of Herodotus. The word comes from the Latin auctus, meaning to increase. An obscure term for auction, one guaranteed to impress friends and neighbors, is the Latin word subhastare. It is the conjunction of sub, meaning "under," and hasta, meaning "spear." After a military victory, a Roman soldier would plant his spear in the ground to mark the location of his spoils. Later, he would put these goods up for sale by auction. ¹The highest bidder was called the emptor, whence the term caveat emptor.

I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.

You find that you’re set off by the most obscure triggers, unable to enjoy a date or some time with an old friend. You’re on high alert the entire time, constantly looking out for manipulation & red flags. The slightest jokes will offend you. That feeling of dread in your heart never seems to go away—warning you that anyone and everyone could be out to hurt you. And then, after you spend time with others, you over-analyze the experience and come up with a list of reasons that this person shouldn’t be in your life anymore. Then you feel awful for thinking those things, guilty and ashamed that you could be so disloyal.

We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur. She talks about her grandsons, her daughter who lives in Delphi, her sister or her husband - both gone - obscure friends - dead - obscurer aunts and uncles - lost - ancient neighbors, members of her church or of her clubs - passed or passing on; and in this way she brings the ends of her life together with a terrifying rush: she is a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. All at once - appalling - but I believe it; I wince in expectation of the clap. Her talk's a fence - shade drawn, window fastened, door that's locked - for no one dies taking tea in a kitchen; and as her years compress and begin to jumble, I really believe in the brevity of life; I sweat in my wonder; death is the dog down the street, the angry gander, bedroom spider, goblin who's come to get her; and it occurs to me that in my listening posture I'm the boy who suffered the winds of my grandfather with an exactly similar politeness, that I am, right now, all my ages, out in elbows, as angular as badly stacekd cards. Thus was I, when I loved you, every man I could be, youth and child - far from enough - and you, so strangely ambiguous a being, met me, h eart for spade, play after play, the whole run of our suits.

proluctance n. the paradoxical urge to avoid doing something you've been looking forward to-opening a decisive letter, meeting up with a friend who's finally back in town, reading a new book from your favorite author-perpetually waiting around for the right state of mind, stretching out the bliss of anticipation as long as you can.

The universe is but a tenement of all things visible. Darkness and day the passing guests of Time. Life slips away, a dream of little joy and mean content. Ah! wise the old philosophers who sought To lengthen their long sunsets among flowers, By stealing the young night's unsullied hours And the dim moments with sweet burdens fraught. And now Spring beckons me with verdant hand, And Nature's wealth of eloquence doth win Forth to the fragrant-bowered nectarine, Where my dear friends abide, a careless band. There meet my gentle, matchless brothers, there I come, the obscure poet, all unfit To wear the radiant jewelry of wit, And in their golden presence cloud the air. And while the thrill of meeting lingers, soon As the first courtly words, the feast is spread, While, couched on flowers 'mid wine-cups flashing red, We drink deep draughts unto The Lady Moon. Then as without the touch of verse divine There is no outlet for the pent-up soul, 'Twas ruled that he who quaffed no fancy's bowl Should drain the "Golden Valley" cups of wine

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.

The evils of life spring partly from natural causes, partly from men’s hostility to each other. In former times, competition and war were necessary for the securing of food, which could only be obtained by the victors. Now, owing to the mastery of natural forces which science has begun to give, there would be more comfort and happiness for all if all devoted themselves to the conquest of Nature rather than of each other. The representation of Nature as a friend, and sometimes as even an ally in our struggles with other men, obscures the true position of man in the world, and diverts his energies from the pursuit of scientific power, which is the only fight that can bring long-continued well-being to the human race.

The simplest words we use to describe each other—such as friend, family, stranger—are loaded with judgments. The enormous gulf in meaning between friend and stranger, for example, is filled with interpretations. A friend is treated one way, an enemy another. Even if we do not bring these judgments to the surface, they cloud our vision like dust obscuring a lens.

Remember me. I will be with you in the grave on the night you leave behind your shop and your family. When you hear my soft voice echoing in your tomb, you will realize that you were never hidden from my eyes. I am the pure awareness within your heart, with you during joy and celebration, suffering and despair. On that strange and fateful night you will hear a familar voice -- you'll be rescued from the fangs of snakes and the searing sting of scorpions. The euphoria of love will sweep over your grave; it will bring wine and friends, candles and food. When the light of realization dawns, shouting and upheaval will rise up from the graves! The dust of ages will be stirred by the cities of ecstasy, by the banging of drums, by the clamor of revolt! Dead bodies will tear off their shrouds and stuff their ears in fright-- What use are the senses and the ears before the blast of that Trumpet? Look and you will see my form whether you are looking at yourself or toward that noise and confusion. Don't be blurry-eyed, See me clearly- See my beauty without the old eyes of delusion. Beware! Beware! Don't mistake me for this human form. The soul is not obscured by forms. Even if it were wrapped in a hundred folds of felt the rays of the soul's light would still shine through. Beat the drum, Follow the minstrels of the city. It's a day of renewal when every young man walks boldly on the path of love. Had everyone sought God Instead of crumbs and copper coins T'hey would not be sitting on the edge of the moat in darkness and regret. What kind of gossip-house have you opened in our city? Close your lips and shine on the world like loving sunlight. Shine like the Sun of Tabriz rising in the East. Shine like the star of victory. Shine like the whole universe is yours!

Why should you care so much for Christminster?" she said pensively. "Christminster cares nothing for you, poor dear!" "Well, I do, I can't help it. I love the place — although I know how it hates all men like me — the so-called self-taught — how it scorns our laboured acquisitions, when it should be the first to respect them; how it sneers at our false quantities and mispronunciations, when it should say, I see you want help, my poor friend! ... Nevertheless, it is the centre of the universe to me, because of my early dream: and nothing can alter it. Perhaps it will soon wake up, and be generous. I pray so! ... I should like to go back to live there — perhaps to die there! In two or three weeks I might, I think. It will then be June, and I should like to be there by a particular day.

A Problem of some importance, certainly, these days, is that of anger. When one half of the world is angry at the other half, or one half of a nation is angry at the rest, or one side of town feuds with the other side, it is hardly surprising, when you stop to think about it, that so many people lose their tempers with so many other people. Even if, as in this case, they are two people not usually angry, two people whose lives are obscure and whose emotions are gentle, whose smiles are amiable and whose voices are more apt to be cheerful than raised in fury. Two people, in other words, who would much rather be friends than not and who yet, for some reason, perhaps chemical or sociological or environmental, enter upon a mutual feeling of dislike so intense that only a very drastic means can bring them out of it.

More often than not, these attempts at sociability ended in painful silence. His old friends, who remembered him as a brilliant student and wickedly funny conversationalist, were appalled by what had happened to him. Tom had slipped from the ranks of the anointed, and his downfall seemed to shake their confidence in themselves, to open the door onto a new pessimism about their own prospects in life. It didn't help matters that Tom had gained weight, that his former plumpness now verged on an embarrassing rotundity, but even more disturbing was the fact that he didn't seem to have any plans, that he never spoke about how he was going to undo the damage he'd done to himself and get back on his feet. Whenever he mentioned his new job, he described it in odd, almost religious terms, speculating on such questions as spiritual strength and the importance of finding one's path through patience and humility, and this confused them and made them fidget in their chairs. Tom's intelligence had not been dulled by the job, but no one wanted to hear what he had to say anymore, least of all the women he talked to, who expected young men to be full of brave ideas and clever schemes about how they were going to conquer the world. Tom put them off with his doubts and soul-searchings, his obscure disquisitions on the nature of reality, his hesitant manner. It was bad enough that he drove a taxi for a living, but a philosophical taxi driver who dressed in army-navy clothes and carried a paunch around his middle was a bit too much to ask. He was a pleasant guy, of course, and no one actively disliked him, but he wasn't a legitimate candidate?not for marriage, not even for a crazy fling.

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant. He grew up in another village, where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was 30. Then, for three years, he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a home. He didn’t go to college. He never lived in a big city. He never traveled 200 miles from the place where he was born. He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only 33 when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for his garments, the only property he had on earth. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave, through the pity of a friend. [Twenty] centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race. I am well within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned—put together—have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one, solitary life.29 If

When I mentioned to a friend I was writing a book about eggs he told me to be sure to mention how in Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" the young Arabella incubates a sky-blue egg of a song bird in the cleavage of her bosom ... When I checked, I was disappointed to find it wasn't a song thrush egg, but that of a chicken ... The original image in my mind disintegrated like the sound of a vinyl record after the power has been turned off.

Projection shields us from personal responsibility. It obscures our shame and confusion and places the onus for reconciling it on the body of someone else. We don’t have to work to understand something when it is someone else’s fault. We don’t have to undo the shame-based beliefs we were brought up with. We don’t have to question our parents, friends, churches, synagogues, mosques, government, media. We don’t have to challenge or be challenged.

licotic adj. anxiously excited to introduce a friend to something you think is amazing—a classic album, a favorite restaurant, a TV show they’re lucky enough to watch for the very first time—which prompts you to continually poll their face waiting for the inevitable rush of awe, only to cringe when you discover all the work’s flaws shining through for the very first time. Old English licode, it pleased [you] + psychotic. Pronounced “lahy-kot-ic.

Scene I. A little dark Parlour in Boston: Guards standing at the door. Hazlerod, Crusty Crowbar, Simple Sapling, Hateall, and Hector Mushroom. Simple. I know not what to think of these sad times, The people arm'd,—and all resolv'd to die Ere they'll submit.—— Crusty Crowbar. I too am almost sick of the parade Of honours purchas'd at the price of peace. Simple. Fond as I am of greatness and her charms, Elate with prospects of my rising name, Push'd into place,—a place I ne'er expected, My bounding heart leapt in my feeble breast. And ecstasies entranc'd my slender brain.— But yet, ere this I hop'd more solid gains, As my low purse demands a quick supply.— Poor Sylvia weeps,—and urges my return To rural peace and humble happiness, As my ambition beggars all her babes. Crusty. When first I listed in the desp'rate cause, And blindly swore obedience to his will, So wise, so just, so good I thought Rapatio, That if salvation rested on his word I'd pin my faith, and risk my hopes thereon. Hazlerod. Any why not now?—What staggers thy belief? Crusty. Himself—his perfidy appears— It is too plain he has betray'd his country; And we're the wretched tools by him mark'd out To seal its ruins—tear up the ancient forms, And every vestige treacherously destroy, Nor leave a trait of freedom in the land. Nor did I think hard fate wou'd call me up From drudging o'er my acres, Treading the glade, and sweating at the plough, To dangle at the tables of the great; At bowls and cards to spend my frozen years; To sell my friends, my country, and my conscience; Profane the sacred sabbaths of my God; Scorn'd by the very men who want my aid To spread distress o'er this devoted people. Hazlerod. Pho—what misgivings—why these idle qualms, This shrinking backwards at the bugbear conscience; In early life I heard the phantom nam'd, And the grave sages prate of moral sense Presiding in the bosom of the just; Or planting thongs about the guilty heart. Bound by these shackles, long my lab'ring mind, Obscurely trod the lower walks of life, In hopes by honesty my bread to gain; But neither commerce, or my conjuring rods, Nor yet mechanics, or new fangled drills, Or all the iron-monger's curious arts, Gave me a competence of shining ore, Or gratify'd my itching palm for more; Till I dismiss'd the bold intruding guest, And banish'd conscience from my wounded breast. Crusty. Happy expedient!—Could I gain the art, Then balmy sleep might sooth my waking lids, And rest once more refresh my weary soul.

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain 1.    Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. 2.    Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. 3.    Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. 4.    Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self. 5.    Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops. 6.    Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat. 7.    Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. 8.    Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like. 9.    Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 10.    Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. 11.    Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. 12.    Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening 13.    Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out. 14.    Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. 15.    Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire. 16.    Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. 17.    Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone. 18.    Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness. 19.    Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. 20.    Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. 21.    Liberosis: The desire to care less about things. 22.    Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years. 23.    Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective. John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 16, 2021)

I had tracked down a little cafe in the next village, with a television set that was going to show the World Cup Final on the Saturday. I arrived there mid-morning when it was still deserted, had a couple of beers, ordered a sensational conejo au Franco, and then sat, drinking coffee, and watching the room fill up. With Germans. I was expecting plenty of locals and a sprinkling of tourists, even in an obscure little outpost like this, but not half the population of Dortmund. In fact, I came to the slow realisation as they poured in and sat around me . . . that I was the only Englishman there. They were very friendly, but there were many of them, and all my exits were cut off. What strategy could I employ? It was too late to pretend that I was German. I’d greeted the early arrivals with ‘Guten Tag! Ich liebe Deutschland’, but within a few seconds found myself conversing in English, in which they were all fluent. Perhaps, I hoped, they would think that I was an English-speaker but not actually English. A Rhodesian, possibly, or a Canadian, there just out of curiosity, to try to pick up the rules of this so-called ‘Beautiful Game’. But I knew that I lacked the self-control to fake an attitude of benevolent detachment while watching what was arguably the most important event since the Crucifixion, so I plumped for the role of the ultra-sporting, frightfully decent Upper-Class Twit, and consequently found myself shouting ‘Oh, well played, Germany!’ when Helmut Haller opened the scoring in the twelfth minute, and managing to restrain myself, when Geoff Hurst equalised, to ‘Good show! Bit lucky though!’ My fixed grin and easy manner did not betray the writhing contortions of my hands and legs beneath the table, however, and when Martin Peters put us ahead twelve minutes from the end, I clapped a little too violently; I tried to compensate with ‘Come on Germany! Give us a game!’ but that seemed to strike the wrong note. The most testing moment, though, came in the last minute of normal time when Uwe Seeler fouled Jackie Charlton, and the pig-dog dolt of a Swiss referee, finally revealing his Nazi credentials, had the gall to penalise England, and then ignored Schnellinger’s blatant handball, allowing a Prussian swine named Weber to draw the game. I sat there applauding warmly, as a horde of fat, arrogant, sausage-eating Krauts capered around me, spilling beer and celebrating their racial superiority.

You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.  Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind—graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.  And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last—and yet will remain with you for life.  Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something im-portant about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.  Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.

Constant and one-dimensional focus on the sharing of pain can drive women away from strong female friendships by obscuring the historical reality that women have been and can be for women in other than sisterly suffering ways. The emphasis on victimism also bolsters the conviction that female friendship can arise only for negative reasons: that is, because men are so bad or in reaction to the atrocities promoted by a misogynist culture. Here female friendship seems spawned by the results of the oppression of women. Thus in a better world, presumably one in which men “behave,” female friendship might not be necessary.

Why do you tremble at me alone? cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women showed no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!

I don’t know when I started to realize that my country’s past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i’d believed so trustworthy and predictable—the place I’d grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand—began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don’t write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that’s how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don’t know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound disagreement with that unpredictable reality. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.

Awkward conversations. They’re the heart of the drug trade. The driving force that keeps criminals out of jail is paranoia. You can think you know people, but the truth is, you never know who they’re talking to. The life of an outlaw: Around every corner lies a cop. In every basement waits a bust. Every friend is the guy who sells you out to keep his own ass out of jail. Sure, it was rare, but you just never knew. The result was a series of shorthand and euphemisms so obscure even the pros often weren’t sure what they were talking about. Sales became pickups. Pot, ganja, bud, or weed became lettuce, green, happy, herb, smoke... the list went on, and changed from dealer to dealer.

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said. Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of life is. So Mujo goes east, travels for years, walks roads, climbs the mountain, finds the stairs that lead up to the guru. He ascends the stairs, tens of thousands of them, nearly dies getting up there. At the top, there are millions of pilgrims, he has to wait for months to get to the guru. Eventually it is his turn, he goes to a place under a big tree, and there sits the naked guru, his legs crossed, his eyes closed, meditating, perfectly peaceful - he surely knows the meaning of life, Mujo says: I have dedicated my life to discovering the meaning of life and I have failed, so I have come to ask you humbly, O Master, to divulge the secret to me. The guru opens his eyes, looks at Mujo, and calmly says, My friend, life is a river. Mujo stares at him for a long time, cannot believe what he heard. What's life again? Mujo asks. Life is a river, the guru says. Mujo nods and says, You turd of turds, you goddamn stupid piece of shit, you motherfucking cocksucking asshole. I have wasted my life and come all this way for you to tell me that life is a fucking river. A river? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest, emptiest fucking thing I have ever heard. Is that what you spent your life figuring out? And the guru says, What? It is not a river? Are you saying it is not a river?

I’m guessing that you donate to charity for exactly two reasons, which are tax breaks and sticking it to your do-gooder friends. I could try to explain to you why dung beetles are a vital part of the country’s ecology, but clearly you don’t care. And that’s okay. So instead I’ll tell you this: any arsehole with a credit card can give money to puppies with cancer or toys for sad children, but nothing says ‘I have thought about my charitable donations better than you have’ like giving your money to an environmentally vital but fundamentally unattractive insect. In the ‘who’s best at philanthropy game,’ the person with the most obscure charity wins. Always. And you do not get more obscure than us.

The Dying Man" in memoriam W.B. Yeats 1. His words I heard a dying man Say to his gathered kin, “My soul’s hung out to dry, Like a fresh salted skin; I doubt I’ll use it again. “What’s done is yet to come; The flesh deserts the bone, But a kiss widens the rose I know, as the dying know Eternity is Now. “A man sees, as he dies, Death’s possibilities; My heart sways with the world. I am that final thing, A man learning to sing. 2. What Now? Caught in the dying light, I thought myself reborn. My hand turn into hooves. I wear the leaden weight Of what I did not do. Places great with their dead, The mire, the sodden wood, Remind me to stay alive. I am the clumsy man The instant ages on. I burned the flesh away, In love, in lively May. I turn my look upon Another shape than hers Now, as the casement blurs. In the worst night of my will, I dared to question all, And would the same again. What’s beating at the gate? Who’s come can wait. 3. The Wall A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn! The figure at my back is not my friend; The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn. I found my father when I did my work, Only to lose myself in this small dark. Though it reject dry borders of the seen, What sensual eye can keep and image pure, Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn? A slow growth is a hard thing to endure. When figures our of obscure shadow rave, All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave. The wall has entered: I must love the wall, A madman staring at perpetual night, A spirit raging at the visible. I breathe alone until my dark is bright. Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun. 4. The Exulting Once I delighted in a single tree; The loose air sent me running like a child– I love the world; I want more than the world, Or after image of the inner eye. Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone; I die into this life, alone yet not alone. Was it a god his suffering renewed?– I saw my father shrinking in his skin; He turned his face: there was another man, Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid. He quivered like a bird in birdless air, Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere. Fish feed on fish, according to their need: My enemies renew me, and my blood Beats slower in my careless solitude. I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed. I think a bird, and it begins to fly. By dying daily, I have come to be. All exultation is a dangerous thing. I see you, love, I see you in a dream; I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum, And that slow humming rises into song. A breath is but a breath: I have the earth; I shall undo all dying with my death. 5. They Sing, They Sing All women loved dance in a dying light– The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon! Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one, Then settles back to shade and the long night. A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn, And that cry takes me back where I was born. Who thought love but a motion in the mind? Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing? I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing; Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend. I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds, They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds. I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone: What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!– Eternity defined, and strewn with straw, The fury of the slug beneath the stone. The vision moves, and yet remains the same. In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am. The edges of the summit still appall When we brood on the dead or the beloved; Nor can imagination do it all In this last place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.

I write poems. I'm often laughed at for doing so. My friends and foes, who were born in 1980's or even later aren't savvy with this concept of the reading and writing poems. They're probably not at fault because while they were being brought up in their respective environments, they weren't really taught how to appreciate poetry. Sadly, those same indifferent souls are now raising their children in the same robotic way, keeping them away from an art form as pure as poetry. Anyway, on the path my life, my poems, written and unwritten, are spread throughout like breadcrumbs. Alas! I'm savouring these breadcrumbs alone because no one has chosen to walk by me, maybe because they're skeptic about the taste of these crumbs. They've hypothetically assumed that these crumbs, these poems are bitter. Sigh! They aren't courageous enough to gather the strength to actually taste them. Perhaps this way, the real sweetness of my crumbs, of my poems stays obscured to them. But I haven't let them crush this sweetness beneath their feet and that's why, I've chosen to walk alone instead. How can I not savour these crumbs if I already know that they're leading me to the apex of my life? How can I not write poems if a voice inside me is constantly pecking my hands to give it a form? This voice is my meditation. This voice is my shadow, a shadow which is stubborn enough to remain intact even when I'll be gone. This voice is my concrete, the concrete that I'm made up of. This voice is my power, the power that will shake your senses. This voice is my poetry.

This idea, however, came to nothing: the corridors, which were packed with people on the lookout for the lunch trolley, were impossible to negotiate while wearing the Cloak. Harry stowed it regretfully back in his bag, reflecting that it would have been nice to wear it just to avoid all the staring, which seemed to have increased in intensity even since he had last walked down the train. Every now and then students would hurtle out of their compartments to get a better look at him. The exception was Cho Chang, who darted into her compartment when she saw Harry coming. As Harry passed the window he saw her deep in determined conversation with her friend Marietta, who was wearing a very thick layer of makeup that did not entirely obscure the odd formation of pimples still etched across her face.

What have I earned for all that work,’ I said, ‘For all that I have done at my own charge? The daily spite of this unmannerly town, Where who has served the most is most defamed, The reputation of his lifetime lost Between the night and morning. I might have lived, And you know well how great the longing has been, Where every day my footfall should have lit In the green shadow of Ferrara wall; Or climbed among the images of the past – The unperturbed and courtly images – Evening and morning, the steep street of Urbino To where the Duchess and her people talked The stately midnight through until they stood In their great window looking at the dawn; I might have had no friend that could not mix Courtesy and passion into one like those That saw the wicks grow yellow in the dawn; I might have used the one substantial right My trade allows: chosen my company, And chosen what scenery had pleased me best.’ Thereon my phoenix answered in reproof, ‘The drunkards, pilferers of public funds, All the dishonest crowd I had driven away, When my luck changed and they dared meet my face, Crawled from obscurity, and set upon me Those I had served and some that I had fed; Yet never have I, now nor any time, Complained of the people.’ All I could reply Was: ‘You, that have not lived in thought but deed, Can have the purity of a natural force, But I, whose virtues are the definitions Of the analytic mind, can neither close The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.’ And yet, because my heart leaped at her words, I was abashed, and now they come to mind After nine years, I sink my head abashed.

Because that you are going And never coming back And I, however absolute, May overlook your Track - Because that Death is final, However first it be, This instant be suspended Above Mortality - Significance that each has lived The other to detect Discovery not God himself Could now annihilate Eternity, Presumption The instant I perceive That you, who were Existence Yourself forgot to live - The “Life that is” will then have been A thing I never knewAs Paradise fictitious Until the Realm of you- The “Life that is to be,” to me, A Residence too plain Unless in my Redeemer’s Face I recognize your own - Of Immortality who doubts He may exchange with me Curtailed by your obscuring Face Of everything but He - Of Heaven and Hell I also yield The Right to reprehend To whoso would commute this Face For his less priceless Friend.

Sometimes I wander round and round in circles, going over the same ground, getting lost, sometimes for hours, or days, or even weeks....But I know that if I immerse myself in it long enough, things will clarify, simplify. I can count on that. When it happens, it happens fast. Boom ba boom ba boom! One thing after the other, taking the breath away. And then, you know, I feel like I'm walking out in some remote corner of space, where no mortal's ever been, all alone with something beautiful....Once, when I was in Switzerland some friends took me up in some very high cable cars, climbing up a mountain....There was a restaurant on top and the view was supposed to be sublime. When we got up it was a great disappointment because the clouds were obscuring everything. But suddenly there was a rent in the clouds and there were the Jungrau and two other peaks towering right in front of us....That's what it's like.

Now, you might think that because there are more poets than ever, there might be more opportunities for poets than ever. And you’d be correct. If your fondest wish is to become the next totally obscure minor poet on the block, well, you’re probably already successful at that. This literary landscape has proven itself infinitely capable of absorbing countless interchangeable artists, all doing roughly the same thing in relative anonymity: just happily plucking away until death at the grindstone, making no great cultural headway, bouncing poems off their friends and an audience of about 40 people. A totally fine little life for an artist, to be sure. No grand expectations from the world to sit up and listen. One can live out one’s days quite satisfied to create something enjoyed by a genial cult. But that’s not why any of us are here tonight. We’re here to conquer American Poetry and suck it dry of all glory and juice.

and, amongst others, my breviary with the gold corners, which I beg he will preserve in remembrance of his affectionate uncle.' "The heirs sought everywhere, admired the breviary, laid hands on the furniture, and were greatly astonished that Spada, the rich man, was really the most miserable of uncles — no treasures — unless they were those of science, contained in the library and laboratories. That was all. Caesar and his father searched, examined, scrutinized, but found nothing, or at least very little; not exceeding a few thousand crowns in plate, and about the same in ready money; but the nephew had time to say to his wife before he expired: `Look well among my uncle's papers; there is a will.' "They sought even more thoroughly than the august heirs had done, but it was fruitless. There were two palaces and a vineyard behind the Palatine Hill; but in these days landed property had not much value, and the two palaces and the vineyard remained to the family since they were beneath the rapacity of the pope and his son. Months and years rolled on. Alexander VI. died, poisoned, — you know by what mistake. Caesar, poisoned at the same time, escaped by shedding his skin like a snake; but the new skin was spotted by the poison till it looked like a tiger's. Then, compelled to quit Rome, he went and got himself obscurely killed in a night skirmish, scarcely noticed in history. After the pope's death and his son's exile, it was supposed that the Spada family would resume the splendid position they had held before the cardinal's time; but this was not the case. The Spadas remained in doubtful ease, a mystery hung over this dark affair, and the public rumor was, that Caesar, a better politician than his father, had carried off from the pope the fortune of the two cardinals. I say the two, because Cardinal Rospigliosi, who had not taken any precaution, was completely despoiled. "Up to this point," said Faria, interrupting the thread of his narrative, "this seems to you very meaningless, no doubt, eh?" "Oh, my friend," cried Dantes, "on the contrary, it seems as if I were

Because that you are going And never coming back And I, however absolute, May overlook your Track - Because that Death is final, However first it be, This instant be suspended Above Mortality - Significance that each has lived The other to detect Discovery not God himself Could now annihilate Eternity, Presumption The instant I perceive That you, who were Existence Yourself forgot to live - The “Life that is” will then have been A thing I never knewAs Paradise fictitious Until the Realm of you- The “Life that is to be,” to me, A Residence too plain Unless m my Redeemer’s Face I recognize your own - Of Immortality who doubts He may exchange with me Curtailed by your obscuring Face Of everything but He - Of Heaven and Hell I also yield The Right to reprehend To whoso would commute this Face For his less priceless Friend. If “God is Love” as he admits We think that he must be Because he is a “jealous God” He tells us certainly If “All is possible widi” him As he besides concedes He will refund us finally Our confiscated Gods -

Macrinus was a Moor by birth, from [Mauretania] Caesarea, and the son of most obscure parents, so that he was very appropriately likened to the ass that was led up to the palace by the spirit; in particular, one of his ears had been bored in accordance with the custom followed by most of the Moors. But his integrity threw even this drawback into the shade. As for his attitude toward law and precedent, his knowledge of them was not so accurate as his observance of them was faithful. It was thanks to this latter quality, as displayed in his advocacy of a friend's cause, that he had become known to Plautianus, whose steward he then became for a time. Later he came near perishing with his patron, but was unexpectedly saved by the intercession of Cilo, and was appointed by Severus as superintendent of traffic along the Flaminian Way. From Antoninus he first received some brief appointments as procurator, than was made prefect, and discharged the duties of this office in a most satisfactory and just manner, in so far as he was free to follow his own judgment. Book 79 - 11

I scan my apps to find a new notification—it’s from Instagram. One new follower. I gasp when I open it. Graeme Cracker_Collins has followed me. Graham Cracker. My own private nickname for him. My heart gallops and my chest aches. I click on the tiny photo of Graeme, his face smiling at me from underneath his windswept hair. He’s posted three photos from the Galápagos, and one of them is of me, although you can’t exactly tell. It’s the one he snapped in the highlands. A sunburst obscures most of my face, casting it in shadow, but the outline of my profile cuts a dramatic figure against the trees. I tap on the photo to read the caption. Graeme Cracker_Collins: To the woman who inspired me to rejoin the world, “thank you” will never be enough. Graeme already has more than two hundred followers, many of whom have left messages of love and welcome. Clearly, friends and extended family. Ryan_Collins206 commented on the photo of me: “Who is this woman? I need to give her a kiss.” I swallow past the painful lump in my throat. Graeme has officially returned to the world. Heart cracking, I follow him back.

Deronda to-night was stirred with, the feeling that the brief remnant of this fervid life had become his charge. He had been peculiarly wrought on by what he had seen at the club of the friendly indifference which Mordecai must have gone on encountering. His own experience of the small room that ardor can make for itself in ordinary minds had had the effect of increasing his reserve; and while tolerance was the easiest attitude to him, there was another bent in him also capable of becoming a weakness— the dislike to appear exceptional or to risk an ineffective insistance on his own opinion. But such caution appeared contemptible to him just now, when he, for the first time, saw in a complete picture and felt as a reality the lives that burn themselves out in solitary enthusiasm: martyrs of obscure circumstance, exiled in the rarity of their own minds, whose deliverances in other ears are no more than a long passionate soliloquy— unless perhaps at last, when they are nearing the invisible shores, signs of recognition and fulfilment may penetrate the cloud of loneliness; or perhaps it may be with them as with the dying Copernicus made to touch the first printed copy of his book when the sense of touch was gone, seeing it only as a dim object through the deepening dusk.

We still hadn’t learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you’re just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something. Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There’s the little empty pain of leaving something behind—graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There’s the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There’s the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn’t give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There’s the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens. And if you’re very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last—and yet will remain with you for life. Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don’t feel it.

Yes, my friends, your hunger for history is still pretty segregated. Your knowledge of America often ends at the color line. You end up erasing the black story as the American story, black history as American history. You certainly have an insatiable thirst for history, but only if that history justifies whiteness. Most black folk can’t help but notice what many whites rarely wish, or are compelled, to see: you embrace history as your faithful flame when she kisses you, and yet you spurn her as a cheating mate when she nods or winks at others. You love history when it’s yet another book about, say, the Founding Fathers. No amount of minutia is too tedious. No new fact is too obscure to report. The curiosity about presidents is nearly inexhaustible. History is a friend to white America when it celebrates the glories of American exceptionalism, the beauty of American invention, the genius of the American soul. History is unrestrained bliss when it sings Walt Whitman’s body electric or touts the lyrical vision of the Transcendentalists. History that swings at the plate with Babe Ruth or slides into home with Joe DiMaggio is the American pastime at its best. History hovers low in solemn regard for the men who gave up the ghost at Appomattox and speaks with quiet reverence for the Confederate flags that gleefully waved to secession. Of course all of you don’t sing from the same hymnal. But American history, the collective force of white identity that picks up velocity across the centuries, mouths every note.

I write poems. I'm often laughed at for doing so. My friends and foes, who were born in 1980's or even later aren't savvy with this concept of the reading and writing poems. They're probably not at fault because while they were being brought up in their respective environs, they weren't really taught how to appreciate poetry. Sadly, those same indifferent souls are now raising their children in the same robotic way, keeping them away from an art form as pure as poetry. Anyway, on the path my life, my poems, written and unwritten, are spread throughout like breadcrumbs. Alas! I'm savoring these breadcrumbs alone because no one has chosen to walk by me, maybe because they're skeptic about the taste of these crumbs. They've hypothetically assumed that these crumbs, these poems are bitter. Sigh! They aren't courageous enough to gather the strength to actually taste them. Perhaps this way, the real sweetness of my crumbs, of my poems stays obscured to them. But I haven't let them crush this sweetness beneath their feet and that's why, I've chosen to walk alone instead. How can I not savor these crumbs if I already know that they're leading me to the apex of my life? How can I not write poems if a voice inside me is constantly pecking my hands to give it a form? This voice is my meditation. This voice is my shadow, a shadow which is stubborn enough to remain intact even when I'll be gone. This voice is my concrete, the concrete that I'm made up of. This voice is my power, the power that will shake your senses. This voice is my poetry.

My dear readers, I find myself perplexed by the phantoms that now inhabit our veins and perpetually whisper in our ears. These specters are always watching, their formless eyes casting judgement upon our every thought and action. They stalk us behind screens and within circuits, gathering each tidbit we release into the ether to build their ever-growing profiles of our souls. Through these ghastly portals, our lives have become performance. Each waking moment an opportunity to curate our images and broadcast our cleverness. Nuance has fled in favor of hashtag and like, while meaning has been diced into 280 characters or less. Substance is sacrificed at the altar of shareability, as we optimize each motive and emotion to become more digestible digital content. Authenticity now lives only in offline obscurity, while our online avatars march on endlessly, seeking validation through numbers rather than depth. What secrets remain unshared on these platforms of glass? What mysteries stay concealed behind profiles and pose? Have we traded intimacy for influence, and true understanding for audience engagement? I fear these shadow networks breed narcissism and foster loneliness, masked as connection. That the sum of a life’s joys and sorrows can now be reduced to a reel of carefully selected snippets says little of the richness that once was. So follow the phantoms that stalk you if you will, but do not forget that which still breathes beneath the screens. There you will find humanity, flawed but whole, beautiful in its imperfection and trajectory undefined by likes or loves. The lanterns may flicker and fade, but the darkness that remains has always held truth. Look deeper than the glow, and know that which can never be shared or measured, only felt. In mystery, Your friend, Edgar Allan Poe (Poe talking about social media)

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th